Regulation and Compliance in the Atlantic Fisheries: State/Society Relations in the Management of Natural Resources

236 Pages·2003·1.51 MB·English

by  Stig S. Gezelius (auth.)

REGULATION AND COMPLIANCE IN THE ATLANTIC FISHERIES
Regulation and Compliance
in the Atlantic Fisheries
State/Society Relations in the Management of Natural Resources
by
Stig S. Gezelius
Norwegian Agricultural Economics Research Institute
NILF
Norwegian Agricultural
Economics Research Institute
SPRINGER-SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, B.V.
A CLP. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-94-010-3990-1 ISBN 978-94-010-0051-2 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-94-010-0051-2
Printed on acid-free paper
All Rights Reserved
© 2003 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
Originally published by The University of Oslo in 2003
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2003
No part of this work may be reproduced ,stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted
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Contents

PREFACE.................................................................................................................ix

1. INTRODUCTION..................................................................................................1
1.1 The Cases...........................................................................................................1
1.2 The Research Question......................................................................................2
1.3 Epistemological Ambitions and Research Methods...........................................6
1.3.1 Shaking the Black Box.................................................................................6
1.3.2 The Statuses of Theory................................................................................7
1.3.3 Generation of Data.......................................................................................8
1.4 An Overview of the Book................................................................................10

2. UTILITY, LEGITIMACY AND PUNISHMENT – BASIC ANALYTICAL
FRAMEWORK.....................................................................................................13
2.1 Introduction......................................................................................................13
2.2 The Compliance Literature...............................................................................14
2.2.1 General Schools of Thought......................................................................14
2.2.2 The Utilitarian Approach...........................................................................15
2.2.3 Extended Perspectives................................................................................17
2.3 Modelling Normative Aspects of Compliance.................................................22
2.3.1 Introductory Definitions.............................................................................22
2.3.2 Legitimacy of Law.....................................................................................24
2.3.3 Normative Action.......................................................................................30
2.3.4 Punishment as Symbolic Action................................................................35

3. LEGITIMACY AND SURVIVAL AMONG UERHAVN'S FISHERMEN –
THE NORWEGIAN CASE..................................................................................39
3.1 A Fishing Community in Decline....................................................................39
3.1.1 People and Ways of Living........................................................................39
3.1.2 Meeting Places...........................................................................................40
3.1.3 Vessels, Crews and Fishing........................................................................42
3.1.4 Seasons and Places.....................................................................................46
3.1.5 Government Regulations and Enforcement...............................................47
3.1.6 Conditions of Action at the Time of Fieldwork.........................................52
3.2 Perceptions of Governmental Regulations.......................................................54
3.2.1 Perceived Rationality.................................................................................54
3.2.2 Perceptions of Decision-Making Procedures.............................................57
3.3 The Relevant Social Norms.............................................................................58
3.3.1 Initial Findings...........................................................................................59
3.3.2 Exploring the Relevant Normative Distinctions – Breach of Legitimacy
or Moral Conflict?......................................................................................65
3.3.3 Preliminary Summary................................................................................69
3.4 Strategic Actors in Moral Contexts..................................................................71
3.4.1 Negotiation and Feeling Out......................................................................71
3.4.2 Protecting the Moral Grey Zone................................................................76
vi REGULATION AND COMPLIANCE IN THE ATLANTIC FISHERIES
3.5 Food Fishery – A Breach of the Law's Legitimacy..........................................78
3.6 The Role and Meanings of Formal Enforcement.............................................80
3.6.1 Formal Enforcement and Morality.............................................................80
3.6.2 Formal Enforcement as Symbolic Validation of Law................................82
3.7 Conclusion.......................................................................................................84

4. MONEY, SUBSISTENCE AND MORALITY IN LITTLE SPRUCE
HARBOUR – THE NEWFOUNDLAND CASE.................................................89
4.1 A Fishing Community on the Edge of Crisis...................................................89
4.1.1 People and Ways of Living........................................................................89
4.1.2 Meeting Places...........................................................................................92
4.1.3 Vessels, Crews and Fishing........................................................................93
4.1.4 Seasons and Places.....................................................................................98
4.1.5 Government Regulations and Enforcement...............................................99
4.1.6 Conditions of Action at the Time of the Fieldwork.................................102
Closed Fishery, Closed Money Bag............................................................102
Defending a Way of Life............................................................................105
4.2 Perceptions of Governmental Regulations.....................................................111
4.2.1 Perceived Rationality...............................................................................111
4.2.2 Perceptions of Decision-Making Procedures...........................................119
4.3 Morality, Compliance, Punishment................................................................122
4.3.1 Innocent Food and Dirty Money - Protecting the Common Good...........122
4.3.2 Preliminary Summary..............................................................................131
4.3.3 The Right to Secure a Satisfactory Life - End of TAGS, End of
Compliance?.............................................................................................131
4.3.4 Weak Legitimacy of Law.........................................................................133
4.3.5 Punishment and Powerlessness................................................................134
4.3.6 Formal Surveillance.................................................................................140
4.4 Conclusion.....................................................................................................142

5. ACCOUNTING FOR SIMILARITIES – SYSTEMS OF MORAL
DISTINCTION...................................................................................................147
5.1 Introduction....................................................................................................147
5.2 The Moral Meanings of Food and Money.....................................................148
5.3 Two Moral Spheres of Economic Activity....................................................152

6. ACCOUNTING FOR DIFFERENCES OF LEGITIMACY – STATE/SOCIETY
RELATIONS IN THE MANAGEMENT OF THE NORWEGIAN AND
NEWFOUNDLAND FISHERIES......................................................................157
6.1 Introduction....................................................................................................157
6.2 National Identities..........................................................................................158
6.2.2 Norway.....................................................................................................158
Historical Background................................................................................158
Contemporary Nationalism.........................................................................161
Political Trust..............................................................................................162
Conclusion..................................................................................................164
6.2.3 Newfoundland..........................................................................................164
CONTENTS vii
Historical Background................................................................................164
Contemporary "Nationalism"......................................................................167
Political Trust..............................................................................................170
Conclusion..................................................................................................171
6.3 Industry Influence in Fisheries Management.................................................172
6.3.2 Organising the Industry: Fishermen's Unions..........................................172
6.3.3 Industry Influence in Norwegian Fisheries Management........................176
Formal Procedures......................................................................................176
Informal Procedures....................................................................................179
6.3.4 Industry Influence in the Management of Newfoundland's Fisheries......181
Formal Procedures......................................................................................181
Informal Procedures....................................................................................187
6.3.5 Conclusions on State/Industry Identification...........................................189
6.4 Conclusion.....................................................................................................190

7. RETROSPECT AND GUIDELINES.................................................................193
7.1 Retrospect.......................................................................................................193
7.1.1 The Question............................................................................................193
7.1.2 Case-Specific Interpretations...................................................................194
7.1.3 Generation of Theory...............................................................................197
7.1.4 Conditions of Legitimacy of Law............................................................199
7.1.5 General Theoretical Conclusions.............................................................200
7.1.6 Policy Implications...................................................................................201
7.2 A Few Survey Guidelines..............................................................................202
7.3 Revisiting the Concept of Authority..............................................................204
7.3.1 Basic Approaches.....................................................................................204
7.3.2 A Cognitivist Empiricist Approach..........................................................205
7.3.3 A Cognitivist Approach with a Normative Ambition..............................208
7.3.4 The Utilitarian Empiricist Approach........................................................209

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS.................................................................................215
REFERENCES........................................................................................................217
LIST OF INFORMANTS.......................................................................................229
Government and Unions......................................................................................229
Fishers..................................................................................................................229
Other Personal Communication...........................................................................230
INDEX....................................................................................................................233
Preface

This is a book about fishermen's reasons for obeying fisheries law. The fish
harvesting industry has become subject to state interference to an increasing extent over
the past twenty years. As natural resources become scarce and subsequent fisheries
regulations abound, the question of law-abidingness is brought to the public agenda.
However, there is still little empirical data as regards the dynamics of compliance in this
field, and this book aims to meet a demand for in-depth knowledge. The cases studied
can be regarded as instances of economies dependent on the harvesting of natural
resources for both household and the market, and the study aims to contribute to the
building of more adequate theory on the dynamics of compliance in such economies.
However, focusing on a specific type of setting seldom constitutes a safe escape route
for getting away from more pervasive sociological questions, and it certainly does not in
this case. As any attempt to explain social phenomena, this study is faced with the
fundamental sociological question of how the acts of individuals can best be
understood. The question concerns the interface between the individual and the
collectivity – between collective morality and self-interest. It thus deals with classical
sociological issues such as the nature and regulatory capacity of group norms and
sanctions, and the forms and roles of rationality and strategic action. This is an
empirical study of the mechanisms through which law is transformed into action, and it
thus also deals with the interface between the state and civil society. It is particularly
concerned with the relationship between law and morality, and the nature of legitimate
law. Authority is thus a core issue. The book focuses on economically-motivated crime
and law-abidingness among people who are not generally conceived of as "criminals" or
"deviants", and who definitely do not see themselves as such. We are thus concerned
with the dynamics of compliance within groups normally associated with the broadly
defined collectivity of "law-abiding citizens".
The book is based on an attempt to generate empirical data on the social processes
encompassing individuals' choices in terms of compliance. The data has been generated
in a live setting, and this may be the main difference between this study and most
previous research on crime and compliance.
People concerned with the problem of managing fisheries and other natural resources,
and social scientists concerned with the questions of authority and law-abidingness will
thus most likely be the primary audiences of the book.
I would like to make a couple of notes on technicalities. In the Newfoundland case,
quite a few women fished professionally. The term “fishermen” hence appears to be
inadequate. I have used the gender neutral term “fisher”. Informants are identified with
a letter and a number – for instance B11 – and listed at the end of the list of references.
In cases where the information is based on the statements of specific informants, the
reference number is given in the text. For confidentiality reasons, the information given
about each informant is cut down to the amount necessary to understand the setting. The
reader might also notice that the number of reference numbers is larger than the number
of informants given in Chapter 1. I have given some informants several reference
numbers for reasons of confidentiality.
x REGULATION AND COMPLIANCE IN THE ATLANTIC FISHERIES
This project would have been impossible without the help and support of a large
number of people. First and foremost, I would like to thank the fisher families of the
two communities that have constituted my main cases – “Uerhavn” in Norway and
“Little Spruce Harbour” in Newfoundland, Canada. The people of these fishing
communities have met me with openness, hospitality and confidence. Making a
reasonably up to date presentation of the quite complex fishery management systems of
these areas would have been impossible without the services and good will of several
organisations. I would like to direct special thanks to: the Norwegian Fishermen’s
Association and its Newfoundland counterpart Fish, Food and Allied Workers
(FFAW/CAW), the Department of Fisheries and Oceans in Canada and its Regional
Director General in Newfoundland, the Ministry of Fisheries and the Directorate of
Fisheries in Norway. Many colleagues have helped in various ways. I would like to
direct special thanks to Lars Mjøset and Arne Kalland for comments on all parts of the
book, and Mark Graesser for giving me access to his survey material. Thanks to Susan
Powers for language advice. Thanks also to the following people for help and/or
comments: Raoul Andersen, Svein Ole Borgen, Ottar Brox, Fredrik Engelstad, Svein
Jentoft, Anne Moxnes Jervell, George C. Kennedy, Arne Mastekaasa, Gíslí Palsson, Ole
Jørgen Skog, Frode Veggeland. Thanks also to Geir Hønneland and Jesper Raakjær
Nielsen for interesting discussions. The responsibility for any mistakes and inaccuracies
is fully my own. Social science research easily becomes a full-time job in the most
extreme sense of the word, as the brain is sometimes reluctant to accept the divide
between work and leisure time. Thanks to my wife Lene for having taken that with a
smile.
This project was financed by a scholarship from the Department of Sociology and
Human Geography at the University of Oslo. An additional grant from the Research
Council of Norway covered fieldwork and other costs. The Norwegian Agricultural
Economics Research Institute (NILF) covered costs related to the preparation of the
final manuscript.
1. Introduction

1.1 THE CASES

Technological advances, the geographical and social expansion of markets as well as
institutional developments increasing access to capital have resulted in a vast extension
of human natural resource harvesting capacities in the twentieth century, and there are
few signs that this trend will slow down in the foreseeable future. The questions of
biological limits and ecological sustainability have in various ways and to different
degrees been placed on the political agendas during the past forty years. It has generally
been recognised that this problem must be seen as being the responsibility of political
authorities, at least in principle. However, apart from those instances where the state
itself owns and manages the means of production it is debarred from managing natural
resources directly. It has to manage resources by managing the people who harvest
them. In other words, successful resource management requires successful governance
of people and thereby a minimum level of knowledge of relevant social processes.
Much emphasis has been placed on generating knowledge about the causal connections
between the actions of resource harvesters and the state of nature. This is not difficult to
understand. The ability to predict important long-term ecological consequences of
human activities has so far proven to be limited, and the cases addressed in this study
are no exception in this respect.
In the field of natural resource management less emphasis has been placed on
generating knowledge about the connections between the actions of a government and
the behaviour of resource users. State intervention has tended to be based on tacit
theoretical assumptions about agency rather than empirical investigation of how
management measures actually work. Influential social theory, often inspired by
neoclassical economics, has defined the problem in a way that emphasises the
responsibility of political authorities. However, such theory is based on a number of
problematic assumptions that often have been left unquestioned by decision-making
agencies.
Successful administration requires empirical knowledge of both links in this chain of
natural resource management. It is my hope that this project will contribute to the
knowledge of the state – harvester connection in this chain.
This is a comparative case study. More specifically, it is a study of two fishing
communities − one in Norway and one in Newfoundland − and their respective national
fisheries management systems. I have chosen communities which depend on inshore
and near-shore fishing and which are currently affected by government restrictions on
fish harvesting. But what are these cases of? On the one hand, the project can be
regarded as a study of local, and to some extent national, settings and nothing more. On
the other hand, the study of local settings can be justified by its ability to improve our
capability to grasp more general phenomena. The delimitation of such a phenomenon is
basically a theoretical question and therefore cannot be answered until the theoretical
S. Gezelius, Regulation and Compliance in the Atlantic Fisheries
© The University of Oslo, 2003
2 CHAPTER 1
perspectives and ambitions have been clarified. Moreover, in this kind of study the
process of clarifying such issues will not be finished until the empirical analyses are
completed. The boundaries of this class of cases will be suggested in later chapters, but
the conclusion will be anticipated here. A salient delimitation of the phenomenon of
which the cases studied are regarded as instances is “state regulation and compliance in
the north Atlantic fisheries”. However, it will be argued throughout this book that the
settings studied also can be regarded as instances of a broader class of economies which
depend on natural resources of which harvesting is subjected to state regulation. More
specifically they will be regarded as instances of communities with a long tradition of
dependency on natural resource harvesting, close ties between resource harvesting
activities and other aspects of community life, a high degree of social transparency, and
a tradition of resource harvesting for both the household and the market. This view must
not be mistaken for any ambition of large-scale generalisation of local empirical
findings. Hypotheses will be constructed and their levels of ambition discussed, but
their solidity can only be assessed by future research.

1.2 THE RESEARCH QUESTION

The closure of the northern cod fisheries1 off Newfoundland, announced in 1992, has
been the most drastic example of the new conditions of action having faced north
Atlantic fishermen in the past fifteen years. State intervention in resource harvesting has
affected the lives of fishermen all around the North Atlantic coasts, even though usually
somewhat less dramatically. The assumed collapses of north Atlantic groundfish stocks
in the late 1980s and early 1990s have triggered government measures which have
affected inshore fishermen to an unprecedented degree. Prior to these crises inshore
fishermen found their harvesting activities restricted mainly by weather, fish
accessibility and market conditions. The importance of government regulations was
generally secondary to these factors. However, over the past ten years inshore fishermen
have found government regulations to be major restraints to an increasing extent.
Compared to offshore fisheries, several aspects make state intervention in inshore
fisheries interesting. New developments within state management of fish harvesting
have traditionally been oriented towards the offshore fleets. Resource harvesting
regulations are thus not new in the offshore sector, but it is only since the 1980s that
inshore fisheries have been notably affected. Moreover, inshore fishing has several
hundred years of history as a way of life, and many fishermen are conscious of this fact.
Inshore fishing is also to a large degree directly interwoven with the everyday lives of
fishermen’s home communities. The fishermen, their boats and their activities are
present and visible, and they interact with other community members while at work. In
other words, inshore fishing blurs the distinction between workplace and home, between
working hours and leisure, between colleagues and family or friends. Inshore fishing is
traditionally connected with subsistence production as well as the monetary economy,
and it is as such connected not only with distant markets but also with close relations
through family food supply and local exchange of gifts. Hence, it can be assumed that

1 “The northern cod” is the common name of the cod stock of southern Labrador and eastern Newfoundland.
This area has been defined as 2J, 3K and 3L by the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Organization (NAFO).